Jelly Roll by Kevin Young
"Jelly Roll" by Kevin Young is a conceptual poetry book that narrates the emotional journey of a man deeply in love with a woman named Rider, revealing a progression from romance to painful rejection and eventual self-acceptance. The work is structured in three parts, each filled with poems that serve to chronologically trace this narrative arc. Young creatively intertwines the essence of the blues—a musical form rooted in the African American experience—into his poetry, using musical terminology and vernacular to evoke feelings of loss, despair, and resilience. The poems primarily consist of unrhymed couplets and employ a staccato rhythm, emphasizing economical language and inventive wordplay that enriches the emotional depth of the text. Notable stylistic elements include playful combinations of words and a cadence that reflects the musicality of the blues genre. "Jelly Roll" also connects to a broader tradition of African American poets who have drawn inspiration from blues music, positioning Young within a lineage that includes figures like Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. Overall, this work is not just a poetic collection but a reflection on love and the complexities of loss, resonating deeply with cultural and historical narratives.
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Subject Terms
Jelly Roll by Kevin Young
First published: 2003
Type of work: Poetry
The Poems
Kevin Young’s third book of poems, Jelly Roll: A Blues, is more a conceptual book of poems than a collection. Read in order from beginning to end, the poems tell the chronological story of a man falling in love with a woman named Rider, being painfully rejected by her, and reconciling himself to the loss. The book presents a three-part structure, and each part contains numerous poems that trace these events. Young presents the poems as “a blues,” a form of music first introduced to the United States by Africans during the slave trade. Young’s conception of the book as “a blues” is a literary conceit, an extended metaphor that serves to organize the work. Many of the poems’ titles are music terms from the blues genre, such as “Swing,” “Ragtime,” and “Ditty.” However, Young also reaches outside the genre for other titles: “Aubade,” “Cantata,” and “Bluegrass” are terms associated with other, very different styles of music.
The poems comprise mostly unrhymed couplets of varied meter. The poetic style in Jelly Roll consists of short lines very economically expressed, producing a staccato effect with an occasional rhyme. An extreme example of this economy of style is found in “Zoot”:
Speakeasy she.
Economical style such as this encourages varied interpretations of meaning.
Another stylistic characteristic of the book is creative wordplay. For example, in “Song of Smoke” the speaker watches Rider:
To watch you walk
The compound word “wish-/ whish-whisk” playfully combines at least three ideas: the wishful yearning of the speaker for his beloved, the sensual onomatopoeic whishing of her corduroyed legs rubbing together as she struts, and the whisking or stirring of his blood at the sight of her.
Perhaps a less effective use of wordplay is Young’s jumbling of familiar expressions to create new effects with language. “Errata” contains a number of words expressed in a dyslexic spelling, probably because the speaker’s love for Rider dizzies him. For example, “Baby, jive me gust/ one more bliss” and “you wake me meek/ in the needs.” Such wordplay pleases the eye and ear, but not every instance of Young’s wordplay is as pleasing: “Mill you larry me?” seems more silly than clever. Some readers may consider this wordplay excessive and uneven, even careless, but the degree to which wordplay appeals to a reader is subjective.
The language and the tone of the poems derive from the vernacular language of American blues music, which was sung first by slaves and later adopted by sophisticated musicians. The music of blues has evolved considerably, but the essence of the music remains rooted mainly in feelings of loss and despair but also tenacity in the face of adversity. The poems of Jelly Roll, therefore, express the vernacular language and tone of the blues. Consider, for example, lines such as “She be the reason/ I am before you singing,” or
you set
These lines exhibit familiar, perhaps even clichéd, characteristics of an African American dialect associated with the blues. They even adopt a musical cadence, as does the following:
This town
Critical Context
Kevin Young’s books of poems target themes associated with African American experience. His first book, Most Way Home (1995), portrayed African American experience in the Jim Crow South after World War II. His second, To Repel Ghosts (2001), was inspired by the paintings of the 1980’s New York City artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, an African American of Haitian and Puerto Rican ancestry. Jelly Roll, Young’s third book of poetry and a National Book Award finalist, also explores African American themes. In this book he follows a tradition of canonical poets, such as Langston Hughes, Sterling A. Brown, and James Weldon Johnson, who experimented with the blues as an inspiration for their poetry.
African American poets have been drawn to the blues as an inspiration, because the music is an original African American art form (though deriving from African music). The epigraphs included in Jelly Roll allude to this tradition connecting African American poetry to the blues. The opening epigraph consists of seven couplets from a song by Robert Johnson (1911-1938), a legendary blues songwriter and guitarist of the Mississippi Delta. Each of the book’s following three sections begins with an epigraph from a canonical African American poet: Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000), and Jay Wright (b. 1934). Moreover, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks combined African American dialect and standard usage in their poems, opening the canon of poetry to new poetic language; Kevin Young continues in this tradition, especially in Jelly Roll.
Bibliography
Arnold, Robert. “About Kevin Young.” Ploughshares 32, no. 1 (Spring, 2006): 186-190. Provides a biographical profile of Young, including information on his education, formative writing experiences, achievements, and awards; describes the scope of each of Young’s books and amply quotes Young on his artistic goals. Young is the guest editor of this issue of Ploughshares, so the issue as a whole is revealing of his personal aesthetic and his tastes in contemporary poetry and fiction.
Jarmon, Mark. “A Life on the Page.” The Hudson Review 56, no. 2 (Summer, 2003): 359-368. Critiques five poets’ books, including Jelly Roll, praising Young’s clipped, improvisational style and his use of African American vernacular. Claims Young’s blending of vernacular and standard dialect connects this book culturally and stylistically to work by Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks.
Logan, William. “Satanic Mills.” The New Criterion 21, no. 10 (June, 2003): 68-75. Reviewing books by six poets, including Kevin Young’s Jelly Roll, the author praises Young’s creative wordplay but ultimately finds the book dispiriting, unable to capture the soul of blues music—meaning unbearable loss.
Palattella, John. “Patrimony.” The Nation 280, no. 18 (May 9, 2005): 28-32. Reviewing five of Young’s books, the author describes Young’s method of approaching a book: He selects a genre or overarching theme and then steeps it in an African American cultural history. Most Way Home focuses on Jim Crow Deep South; To Repel Ghosts on the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat; Jelly Roll on American Blues music; and Black Maria on film noir. Palattella claims Jelly Roll and Black Maria are marred by weak puns and sloppy wordplay.